Paper Monitor
13:41 UK time, Tuesday, 7 July 2009
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
Google. Grrr!
Or should that be Grrr-eat!
It's hard to tell which camp the Daily Mail falls into. On page 14 Stephen Glover holds forth on how he'd rather - or even the Government - than to Google, after the Conservatives floated the idea of outsourcing a central medical database to Google or Microsoft.
Quite some argument to sustain, you might think. How does he do?
He raises his own bar from the start, setting out what a useful service Google provides.
If I want to know the telephone number of a shop or restaurant, I can Google it at no charge, instead of wasting money telephoning one of the various successors to Directory Inquiries. Google can direct me instantly to any one of hundreds of useful databases when I am writing an article... As a search engine it has been a revolutionary, and apparently almost entirely beneficent, force...
So is he being over suspicious? He doesn't think so, and proceeds to set out a reasonable argument about how effective Google and Microsoft are as operators, and his concerns about concentrating too much personal information in private hands - whoever's hands these might be.
So how does he turn the argument round to Bin Laden? How is the murderer of thousands and an avowed enemy of the West become a preferred supplier of IT services? Here's how he makes the case:
I would far rather stick [my personal details] in an envelope and send them to Osama Bin Laden or Vladimir Putin.
Right... OK. Your choice. Paper Monitor will probably stick with Google or Microsoft if it's all the same to you.
And despite this position, the Mail too obviously finds it a bit too hard to keep the hard line it has established on page 14. Because on page 28, Google only goes and provides the source material for a key Mail feature. The paper is inordinately fond of quirky double-page picture spreads, and today's is . All found using Google Earth.
And finally, should Paper Monitor buy a hat?
The Guardian's Media Monkey points out that the editor of Times has used his paper to .
And his fiancée is one Kate Weinberg, who may or may not be the who writes for the Daily Telegraph on a regular basis.
If it is she, it's like Fleet St's own Romeo and Juliet. but with a happy ending. Sweet.
The 
